Odds and Ends: Week 3

A good sports betting column should be backed by a profitable gambler with a proven track record. It should offer picks generated by a sophisticated and conceptually sound model. Most importantly, it should treat the subject with the seriousness it warrants.

This is not that column.

Instead, this will be an off-beat look at the sports betting industry-- why Vegas keeps winning, why gambling advice is almost certainly not worth the money, and the structural reasons why even if a bettor were profitable, anything they wrote would be unlikely to make their readers net profitable, too.

While we're at it, we'll discuss ways to minimize Vegas' edge and make recreational betting more fun, explain how to gain an advantage in your office pick pools, preview games through an offbeat lens (with picks guaranteed to be no worse than chance), and tackle various other Odds and Ends along the way.

Beating Vegas is Hard. Beating your Coworkers is Not.

I've gone on at length already about how I have no edge against Las Vegas (and even if I did, it's not like I could pass it on to you). But office pick pools are another thing entirely. At my wife's work, they used to do an annual picks pool. My wife doesn't follow football at all, but she kicked in her $20 every year and gave me the password to her account so I could pick teams for her. And in two seasons in the pool, I finished 1st and 2nd (in a field of 40+ entrants) before she got booted for bringing in a ringer.

How is it that I can't beat Vegas, but I can beat a bunch of other people in a contest designed around beating Vegas? There was obviously a fair bit of luck involved, but I also have three tips to help give you a significant edge against your coworkers.

Lesson 1: The Best Ability is Availability

The biggest secret to winning a picks pool is simply making all the picks. Oftentimes, you'll find a quarter to half of the field essentially eliminates itself along the way simply by forgetting to get their picks in on occasion. There are 272 games a season, meaning if you flipped a coin for each pick, you'd expect to notch 136 wins. If someone forgets to submit their picks for a non-bye week, they'll need to win 53.1% of their remaining picks to get to 136 wins.

But even if every participant was likely to win 50% of picks by chance alone, it's a near-certainty that the best record in a larger pool will be noticeably better than 50/50. If the top team lucks into a 55% hit rate, they'll finish with 150 wins; a team that forgot to submit picks one week would need to win 58.5% in all the other weeks to match that.

Even missing a few Thursday Night games here or there can be fatal to your chances, as each game is essentially worth at least half a win in expectation. As a simple estimate, assume that for every five games you don't pick, you'll need to do 1% better in all remaining games to make up the difference.

Personally, I set a reminder for myself as soon as the contest opened up for picks every week to go in and place some dummy picks. Go with all favorites, all underdogs, all home teams, all road teams, go with whichever team has the shortest name or the scariest mascot or the cutest quarterback, it doesn't matter. Just getting your picks in-- any picks at all-- is worth a baseline of 6-8 wins a week. You can (and should) always log back in later in the week to change your picks, but getting some dummy picks in ASAP protects against the possibility that life happens and it slips your mind.

Lesson 2: Leveraging Vegas Against your Colleagues

Most pick pools freeze lines at a certain point in time so that everyone is operating on an even playing field. Remember, the reason why it's so hard to beat Vegas is because spreads are a moving target, but that's not the case in pick pools. In fact, you can use line movement to your advantage.

Say the Broncos are playing the Raiders, and the line opens at Denver -2. Then, let's say that over the course of the week, the line moves further in Denver's favor, settling at Denver -3. Las Vegas is basically saying that if you're given the line "Denver -2", you should take the Broncos because the Broncos are actually three points better than the Raiders. Normally, you can't use this information to your advantage because by the time it reaches "Denver -3", any offers of "Denver -2" are long gone. But you can and should use it to your advantage in pick pools where the lines are frozen in place.

Whenever the line moves during the course of the week, always pick the team that the line moves towards. Doing this all but guarantees you a better than 50% success rate.

(If you want a good source for current lines, I get the ones for this column from NFLGameData.com, which is not a gambling site and is therefore not trying to sell me anything. But lines rarely differ much from site to site, so feel free to use whatever you're seeing on your gambling platform of choice.)

Lesson 3: You Only Have to Outrun the Bear

We've all heard the "outrun the bear" joke. Two friends are wandering through the forest when suddenly, a bear sees them from a distance and starts running toward them. One friend bends down to tighten the laces on his shoes, and the other friend says, "surely you don't think you can outrun a bear?!" The first friend says, "Don't have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you." That's how it is in office pick pools. You don't have to pick a ton of games correctly. You just need to pick one more game than the second-place finisher got.

Why does this matter? Because you can anticipate who your coworkers will pick and use that against them. In my case, I was participating in a pick pool held just outside of Dallas, Texas. You know who virtually everyone picked virtually every week? The Dallas Cowboys. You know who I picked against every week? The Dallas Cowboys. Is it because I thought the Cowboys were the worse pick per se? Nope, it's because I wasn't trying to outrun the bear; I was only trying to outrun my friends.

Imagine a hypothetical league with 100 participants where 99 are die-hard Cowboys fans and will pick Dallas every week, come hell or high water. Let's also imagine, hypothetically speaking, that everyone picks exactly 50% in all other games. If I also pick Dallas every week, the best-case scenario is I wind up in a 100-way tie for first. (And the worst-case scenario is I wind up in a 100-way tie for last.) That gives me a 100% chance of having a 1-in-100 shot at winning the pool, which is a 1% shot in expectation. Picking the same team everyone else picks doesn't hurt my odds of winning... but it doesn't help them, either.

Now, if I pick *against* Dallas every week, I will either wind up all alone in last place (if Dallas covers the spread more often than not) or all alone in first place (if Dallas fails to cover the spread more often than not). Since each scenario is equally likely, that means I have a 50% chance at having a 0% shot at winning and a 50% chance at having a 100% shot at winning. Making the contrarian pick dramatically improves my odds of winning in expectation. In general, the more contrarian your picks are, the more they help you outrun your friends. If you work near a major NFL city and everyone is a fan of the local team, pick against it every week.

Later in the season, you can also see where you stand and who your top competitors are and tailor your picks appropriately. If you and another co-worker wind up well ahead of everyone else with two weeks to go, you should try your best to pick the exact same picks as your coworker every week. After all, if you pick the same teams as them, they can't make up any ground (and everyone else is so far back you're not worried about them catching up). Similarly, if you find yourself eight games out of first with three weeks to go, you should double down on trying to make contrarian picks because you can never make up ground picking the same teams as the people ahead of you, even if those teams are the better picks.

At the end of the day, these strategies don't guarantee you anything. Picking games is still a fairly random activity, and randomness is, by its very nature, unpredictable. I was lucky to participate in these pools in two seasons where the Cowboys did very poorly against the spread, which gave me a pretty solid advantage. Had I participated in strong seasons for the Cowboys, I likely would have finished in the back half of the league.

But while being strategic about who you pick doesn't guarantee you anything, it dramatically increases your odds of walking out of the season with a little bit of extra pocket money donated by your unsuspecting friends and colleagues.

Tracking the Unders

In 2022 and 2023, mass-betting the unders was incredibly profitable over the first 6 weeks and essentially just broke even after that. I hypothesized last week that maybe all we needed to do to make a killing was to start our "mass-bet the unders" strategy earlier this year. Week 2 did nothing to disprove that hypothesis; unders went 11-5, turning a 31% profit.

If you put $10 on the under in every game (and you saw the exact same lines I saw and got all action at -110), you'd have made $50 last week. (Briefly consider quitting while you're ahead.)

I said we'd be tracking two different betting strategies-- placing $10 on every game vs. starting with $160, rolling over our winnings from week to week, and placing an equal amount of our remaining bankroll on every game. For the first week, those two strategies are indistinguishable; thanks to our strong start, that will change immediately.

The "snowball strategy" has seen its bankroll grow to $210 and as a result will be betting $13.13 on the under in each game in Week 3. With another great week, those gains can compound even further. (Just don't ask what happens with a particularly bad week.)

Lines I'm Seeing